Growth rates for storage consumption may increase for many types of applications. Enterprises may store huge amounts of data on multiple systems and networks, and on various media formats including disk, tape, and optical storage. Restrictions on computer system storage may even limit the launch of new business programs.
Storage and system administrators may wish to manage available storage for productive uses and not wasted on unproductive ones. Increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of storage or system administrators may be important. To manage storage efficiently, understanding how storage is used, as well as identifying where storage is being wasted, may be critical.
Storage and system administrators may desire a central view of computer storage resources and their usage. Depending on system requirements, they may desire tools for both for planning and for analysis and reporting, as well as for more operational tasks such as blocking improper usage of storage or alerting administrators to out-of-capacity conditions. Storage and systems administrators may desire combined storage and resource management functions to enhance their capabilities. For example, storage and system administrators may desire asset management (physical asset number, product serial number, installation data, location of equipment, warranty period, cost), capacity management (real-time and historical usage trends), charge-back (either with a formal charge-back function or some ad hoc reporting capabilities, e.g., cost accounting), data migration (movement of data across the enterprise, including backup and restore solutions), event management (alerting and logging of events), media management (tracking removable media both on-site and off-site). Other desirable functions may include some form of quota enforcement, which may be complex across multiple operating systems, as well as some way to measure storage performance.
Storage and system administrators may also wish to have the ability to generate reports that may be run, for example, either on a one-time basis or on a schedule, and that provide a variety of ways of looking at storage usage at a given moment as well as trends over time. System and storage administrators may also need special software to implement policy-based management. The use of policies, or rules-based actions, may significantly extend the amount of storage one administrator may manage.
System and storage administrators may also need a storage management system to support a variety of platforms or operating systems, e.g., a Windows-only environment, an open systems environment such as UNIX, and/or a mainframe computer system.